Sometimes, when I'm really bored, I would just go to some popular art or literature sites and just sort by recent. You would be surprised with the huge amount of works there actually are on any platform, that no one will actually get to see.
And that's most likely because almost everything you will find when sorting by recent is... amateurish. Bland. Unpolished. You know these works won't ever get far, because you and most people are used to see popular, well made works - you know what the good stuff is and this is definitely not it.
And yet, this had become a habit for me. Because some of the stuff I could find had the tiniest of sparks. Even amateurs are able to produce something that makes you say "this person could make it big in the future". Very rarely, you encounter something that is like, actually very good, and yet has barely any numbers on it, and you wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't for this unfiltered dive.
I found some of the artists I now follow like this. I got into reading entire books because of a chapter I randomly started to read because of sorting by recent. I found my all-time favorite literature series like this too.
But something started to happen in the recent years.
Yes, fuck it. This is a post about AI.
Some years ago, some weird literature works started to pop up. They had weirdly specific titles. You would start reading them, but would end up closing the tab out of boredom. The writing always being this not incorrect, but just bland mash-up of words. I guess someone really wanted to have something about this topic but didn't have much experience in writing?
But how come there are now being more works like these being uploaded? I guess people got into writing lately. And yet, most of these works were uninteresting. Nothing ended up going anywhere. Works like these were starting to blend in with the actual amateur writing I was used to read.
And these kept popping up, there was no end to them. It got to a point where I just... stopped sorting by recent. Nothing was worth my time, and it was pretty clear most of these were not done by an actual human.
Now more recently... the same has started happening with drawings. Nowadays it's easy to find these weird specific AI images among the usual amateur works, funnily the same account sometimes uploading the same idea 2 or 3 times in a row just with a slight different angle.
And for these AI drawings, you don't even need to click and zoom in to search for the "mistakes" to know they're AI. Most of the times, the composition will be bland. The colors will be specific. Many of these just look the same and you start catching on the patterns. They never really have anything to say.
And of course, they start blending in alongside actual works made by beginners who now will have even less chances to be visible to anyone.
Nowadays I barely sort by recent anymore.
You could make the argument that this doesn't happen on every platform, as some will have a strong policy against AI. And yes, I know, I'm just talking about popular sites here. But it still saddens me, how AI is destroying so many things I once loved about the internet.
